Two Tables at the Same Wedding

Nobody arranged it. Farid has asked, since, and everybody says the same thing and everybody is telling the truth.

There was no seating plan for the afternoon part. People sat where they sat.

And by half past three, at his niece's wedding, in a hall with about a hundred and forty people in it, his family and the people they came from were at the long table under the window, and the others were at the long table by the door, and the twenty feet between was the most carefully maintained twenty feet Farid has ever seen.

Not one unkind thing happened all day.

People crossed. Cousins hugged. Two old men who had known each other sixty years sat together for a while in the middle and it was warm and it was real.

And then they went back.

Farid is fifty-nine and he has been at that kind of afternoon perhaps thirty times, at weddings and funerals both, and this is the first time he watched it happen rather than simply being inside it.

He watched because his son, who is twenty-four and lives elsewhere now, said something in the car on the way, offhand: are the other lot coming?

The other lot. Said by a twenty-four-year-old, with no malice at all, about people whose great-grandparents and his own great-grandparents met in the same front rooms and wanted the same thing and used the same words for it.

And Farid did not correct him, because he could not think of what the correction would be.

He is not angry at anybody. He does not think there is a villain in it and he has read enough to know that both sides had people in them who were sincere and hard-working and afraid.

But he sat at that wedding under the window, with his tea going cold, in front of a hundred and forty people who were all perfectly polite, and the sentence that arrived was: we did this over trying to be one.

He has not said that to anybody.

And you may have sat at that afternoon. And you may have spent it being extremely polite.

Nehemiah confesses his own family's history in the first person

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it since the wedding and it was never yours to carry alone.

You are not the one who caused this. You never were, and owning something is not the same as being blamed for it. Scripture has a man praying about his own people's history and putting himself inside the sentence on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a settled account of who was right, who makes that kind of honesty possible. Set it down here at this table. It is heavy and it has been in your chest since half past three.

Now hear it, and hear where he puts himself.

I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father's family, have committed against you. We have acted very wickedly toward you.Nehemiah 1:6-7

Including myself and my father's family.

He was not there. Most of what he is confessing happened before he was born and he had no hand in any of it, and he does not use that as a doorway out.

And notice he does not apportion it. There is no faction named, no wing of the family identified as the ones who actually did it. He says we, and he puts his own house in the sentence, and that is the whole prayer's posture.

You are allowed to own something you did not cause. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who lets a man say it without flinching, and He has never once required a verdict before honesty.

Now let me be careful here, because there are ditches on both sides and I have no intention of putting you in either.

Nothing here says the people who came before you were foolish. They were not. They were reaching for something enormous and true, that Christians should be one and that this could actually happen. His Spirit lit that fire and it warmed real houses and it is still warm in yours.

And nothing here says the other table is the problem. It does not. They have their own version of this afternoon and their own tea going cold, and Scripture in that prayer names no faction and neither will I.

The point is only about the twenty feet, and Scripture has a man confessing what his own house did without assigning it to anybody, and His Spirit is the one who holds a person steady while they say it.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. Your son is not being disloyal.

He is using the only word that was ever handed to him, and it was handed politely, over about ninety years, at afternoons exactly like that one. His Spirit was in that car too, and He was not asking you for a correction, because the correction was never the thing that was needed.